THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

The trip begins in a tunnel, and when the train emerges the boulevards lined with bistro awnings are gone.  Even the weather seems different – damp and murky, with a wind blowing in from the southwest. (The suburbs of the 93 grew around factories that had been situated northeast of Paris in order to allow industrial smells to drift away from the City of Light.). The rail tracks cut through a disordered landscape of graffiti-covered walls, glass office buildings, soccer fields, trash fires, abandoned industrial lots, modest houses with red tiled roofs, and clusters of twenty-story monoliths – the cités.

Packer/New Yorker, 2015